Monday, October 9, 2006

Reading List: Automotive Atrocities

Oh my, oh my, there really were some awful automobiles on the road in
the 1970s and 1980s, weren't there? Those born too late to experience
them may not be fully able to grasp the bumper to bumper shoddiness
of such rolling excrescences as the diesel Chevette, the exploding
Pinto, Le Car, the Maserati Biturbo, the Cadillac V-8-6-4 and
even worse diesel; bogus hamster-powered muscle cars (“now
with a black stripe and fake hood scoop, for only $5000 more!”);
the Yugo, the DeLorean, and the Bricklin—remember that one?

They're all here, along with many more vehicles which, like so many
things of that era, can only elicit in those who didn't live
through it, the puzzled response, “What were they thinking?”
Hey, I lived through it, and that's what I used to think when
blowing past multi-ton wheezing early 80s Thunderbirds (by then, barely disguised
Ford Fairmonts) in my 1972 VW bus!

Anybody inclined toward automotive
Schadenfreude
will find this book enormously entertaining, as long as you weren't one of
the people who spent your hard-earned, rapidly-inflating greenbacks
for one of these regrettable rolling rustbuckets. Unlike many
automotive books, this one is well-produced and printed, has few if
any typographical errors, and includes many excerpts from the
contemporary sales material which recall just how slimy and
manipulative were the campaigns used to foist this junk off onto
customers who, one suspects, the people selling it referred to in the
boardroom as “the rubes”.

It is amazing to recall that almost a generation exists whose
entire adult experience has been with products which, with relatively
rare exceptions, work as advertised, don't break as soon as you take them
home, and rapidly improve from year to year. Those of us who remember
the 1970s took a while to twig to the fact that things had really changed
once the Asian manufacturers raised the quality bar a couple of orders
of magnitude above where the U.S. companies thought they had optimised their
return.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will confess that I once drove
a 1966 MGB, but I didn't buy it new! To grasp what awaited the
seventies denizen after they parked the disco-mobile and
boogied into the house, see
Interior
Desecrations.